UNCOVERING VOTING MACHINE FAILURES
REQUEST FOR RECORDS SUBMITTED TO ELECTIONS DIVISION OF THE TEXAS SECRETARY OF STATE
On November 28, 2018, Free Speech For People and the National Election Defense Coalition submitted a request for records under the Texas Public Information Act for information about a serious voting machine problem that manifested during the 2018 general election.
About 82 of Texas’s 254 counties (including some of its most populous) use the obsolete and trouble-plagued Hart InterCivic eSlate voting machines. During the 2018 general election, many voters using eSlate voting machines discovered that when they selected the straight-ticket voting option, their recorded votes on the summary page showed that they had voted for the candidate for the U.S. Senate from a different political party. The Director of Elections acknowledged on October 23, 2018, “We have heard from a number of people voting on Hart eSlate machines that when they voted straight ticket, it appeared to them that the machine had changed one or more of their selections to a candidate from a different party. This can be caused by the voter taking keyboard actions before a page has fully appeared on the eSlate, thereby de-selecting the pre-filled selection of that party’s candidate.” As the Secretary of State later noted, the eSlate voting machine’s display rendering is so slow that a voter must “wait at least 3-5 seconds for all choices to be rendered on the eSlate voting machine” (or longer in some counties) or else risk inadvertently selecting an opposing party’s candidate.
At this point, it is unclear the extent to which this voting machine problem affected the final vote totals. But regardless of its influence on the outcome in the 2018 election, a basic principle of democratic elections is that they must use equipment that reliably clarifies and registers the voter’s choices.